Facebook first-mover off to build Qubescape

Aaron Greenspan made the front page of the NY Times business section recently. The story written by John Markoff said Aaron claimed to be "the one who created the original college social networking system," which eventually became Facebook. As Aaron tells me in this interview, he simply wants people to know that he and others had "influence" in the early days of building Facebook. Aaron also shares a little about his new venture called Qubescape, which he calls a "Facebook for companies." Aaron said it launches at the end of this month.

Facebook is the social network phenomenon that burst onto the scenes in 2004. I met and interviewed Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2005, around the time Facebook's traction was embarking on a sharp rocket-ship trajectory. Here's the column and interview I did with Mark while I was a columnist at MarketWatch. To me, he will always be the "founder." But I would never call it one way or another. I really don't know. I'll just let those who claim to be the "founders" or "creators" of one of the hottest Internet properties speak for themselves. I was fortunate enough to bump into Aaron at a NewTech Meetup event I was presenting at. Aaron was nice enough to give me an interview. In the video he elaborated on some of the points made in the NY Times article. In that piece, Markoff wrote: "As a Harvard student in 2003 — six months before Facebook started and eight months before ConnectU went online — Mr. Greenspan established a simple Web service that he called houseSYSTEM. It was used by several thousand Harvard students for a variety of online college-related tasks. Mr. Zuckerberg was briefly an early participant. An e-mail message, circulated widely by Mr. Greenspan to Harvard students on Sept. 19, 2003, describes the newest feature of houseSYSTEM, as “the Face Book,” an online system for quickly locating other students. The date was four months before Mr. Zuckerberg started his own site, originally “thefacebook.com.”